>--' - -- t! take your distance and stop and jump, ev- erything has a procedure-but I never did it that way. I don't take a risk, though, that I know I can't do. I like life too much." He said that parkour hadn't changed much, since he started it, but his intention had become more specific. 'When I was younger, I was playing, the way kids play at parkour, but now I ask the question 'Is this going to be useful for me to get to the other side?' The movement is simple. I don't do anything special, because I want to get to the other side. What 1'm inter- ested in for parkour is the utilitarian thing of getting to the other end, whether as a task or a challenge, but in film they like a little entertainment, so I do that, too, but it's not what 1'm interested in. "You always have to get through the first obstacle that says, 'I can't do it,' whether in your mind or for real, and be able to adapt to anything that's put in your path. It's a method for learning how to move in the world. For finding the liberty men used to have." I asked David why he had gone to India, and he said that he had friends there. "How did you pass the time?" "I just kept training," he said. "I was training in the trees." Jeff handed me a scrapbook with a photograph of David leaping from the limb of one tree to an- other. He was stretched flat out, hor- izontal to the ground, like Superman. "I was at a waterfall one day," David went on, "and there were huge trees all around, and in the trees were monkeys. There were fences and barriers around them, so they couldn't get out, but I went around the barriers and played with the monkeys. After that, I watched them all the time, learning how they climbed. All the techniques in parkour are from watching the monkeys." He then showed us, on a computer, a documentary called "Warriors of the Monkey God." It was about a tribe of monkeys who live on the rooftops of Jodhpur. The people regard the mon- keys as holy. We watched them leap- ing from rooftop to rooftop and through the trees. The scene that made David smile was one in which numbers of them leaped onto, then off, a piece of cor- rugated tin that was loosely attached as a roof to some stakes. Their land- ings made the tin shake. Some of the monkeys were leaping from the ground, turning on their sides in the air, land- ing on the stakes and shoving off from them-a tic-taco Watching the movie, which was about forty-five minutes long, took only about fifteen minutes, because David kept advancing it to scenes of the mon- c '1 happen to think the blue light of the TV screen is very romantic. " keys in flight, looking exactly like tra- ceurs. When it was finished, he said that after coming home he had just contin- ued perfecting what he had learned from the monkeys. He had plans, he said, to make a movie with them. I asked about the fall on the Internet, the one that the American traceurs al- ways talk about. David gave a little smile. "I was a bit tired," he said. "It was the end of the day. I was just doing stuff with a bunch of kids. I fall all the time-I fall like the monkeys-but it never shows up on film, because they just want the spec- tacular stuff" I thought of Nikita with his bleed- ing hands and said, "You never wear gloves ?" He said that he wanted to be able to feel the surfaces he was grabbing. He held his palms out for me to feel, and they were as hard and slick as linoleum. I told him that I had been to see peo- ple do parkour in Colorado, and that they had imagined themselves as preparing to use it for an escape, and he said, "That's good. If you're really thinking about how to defend yourself: how to be useful, then that's a very different mind-set from just doing things to look good." Last fall, David said, he had discus- sions with Sam Raimi, the director of "Spider-Man," about playing the role of Spider-Man' s double, but he decided he wasn't interested. "That was a child- hood dream, to be in a Spider-Man cos- tume," he said. "Now 1'd rather appear on a poster with my own name, not as a character, saying, 'This is me perform- ing.,,, He was planning to tour the world doing parkour, he said. A French film company partly owned by the director Luc Besson paid his expenses to perform last winter in Madagascar, and David had also given exhibitions in Italy, Germany, and Portugal. He yawned and rubbed his throat, and I took it as a sign that he was at the end of his interest in talking. I thanked him and stood up. We shook hands. He seemed to think for a moment, then he said, "1' m still learning. 1'm not sure of anything yet, 1'm just trying to be as complete as I can." I nodded. 'What I do is not really something that can be explained," he said. "It can just be practiced." Then he went to call us a taxi. .